If I had an old ST-506 drive connected to an A440, what would be a way to create a bit-for-bit copy of the drive. I have IDE and SCSI drives to put the image on, which can then be copied over Econet or Ethernet to other machines for safe keeping.

I had planned to use !FCFS to read the drive, but it complains about it not being E-format.

It may be worth seeing whether ADFS_DiscOp 1 gets data off the disc. If it does, write a loop to read a few hundred kilobytes at a time and store them somewhere; you might be home and dry.

I was trying to avoid having to write anything, I was looking for something that would just work. I don't have any other ADFS hard disc to try it on, and I don't want to be using the old drive any longer than necessary.

IanS wrote:I was trying to avoid having to write anything, I was looking for something that would just work. I don't have any other ADFS hard disc to try it on, and I don't want to be using the old drive any longer than necessary.

I came across this a couple of years ago -- looks like the programming has already been done for you

IanS wrote:I was trying to avoid having to write anything, I was looking for something that would just work. I don't have any other ADFS hard disc to try it on, and I don't want to be using the old drive any longer than necessary.

I came across this a couple of years ago -- looks like the programming has already been done for you

No, I can't think of any easy way to do that. Hard disks don't show up in DeviceFS, do they? Assuming not, I think the ADFS_DiscOp suggestion is probably about as good as it gets. Sadly *BACKUP only works for floppy disks if I remember right.

Disclaimer: I've not written any significant BBC Basic in well over a decade and I don't have a machine I can test that on. It might be horribly wrong. It almost certainly has some minor glitch or other.

I think that just trades one problem into many others. I'd then have to work out how to get networking working and a way to copy the file from RISCiX.

I'll probably just stick with the file level copy I have.

Ether1 and Ether2 cards supported, plus (apparently) Ether3 using the installation from 4corn.co.uk; ifconfig and route commands to get onto your local LAN then ftp. Been transferring stuff the other way and RISCiX ftp is >50% faster than ANT's!

I could also suggest ARMLinux or NetBSD-acorn26, but getting either up and running on a A440 would be "interesting", I think.

IIRC I did once set up a ST506 podule in a RiscPC, soft-loading the ADFS module from 3.10 as ADFS in a RiscPC ROM does not support ST506. Again IIRC, that RPC was on 4.02, possibly 4.39 by the time of the experiment. ARMLinux for RiscPC is more straightforward option than for Archimedes (not sure if there is a driver for the ST506 podule - ARMLinux has been done as an OS/hdf image for arcem so the chances seem reasonable, though it may have dropped out of the source tree since then).

Final thought - the ST506 interface supports two drives, so if you can source a second HD in better condition (and necessary cables), that could give you breathing space to copy files and then extract bit-for-bit over serial from the "new" HD.

Not that it really helps the original poster with his immediate problem, but http://www.pdp8online.com/mfm/ seems like quite a good solution for whole-disk copies of arbitrary old MFM drives. I have bought one of those boards in hopes of being able to retrieve the data from some of the old disks in unknown formats that I have kicking around.

At the CCH earlier this year Sarah Walker and I bodged SCSIReader into ADFSReader to image an st506 drive, if memory serves all you need to so is change the SCSI_* SWIs to ADFS_* with the same names. Oh possibly some changes for sector sizes too ...